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Seeking latitude to press liberal causes, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs distances itself from federations
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the onetime standard-bearer for outreach to the non-Jewish world whose influence has waned, is loosening its financial and organizational ties to the Jewish Federations of North America in a bid to reassert its traditional role.
The decision announced Monday to go it alone, announced in a press release and a two-page brochure that will go out to Jewish organizations, will free the JCPA to pursue liberal agenda items that are favored by American Jews but can alienate or unsettle donors to the federation system who are more conservative or at least more cautious about maintaining an appearance of being nonpartisan.
The decision marks a resolution to tensions that surged in 2020, when JCPA was among 600 Jewish groups to sign onto a full-page New York Times ad declaring “Black Lives Matter.” That set off alarms among some conservative donors because of the anti-Israel positions adopted by some of the Black Lives Matter movement’s leading individuals and organizations.
As a result, JCPA and JFNA entered into talks about their shared future. Insiders said last year, as tensions burst into public view, that it was likely that the ailing JCPA would fold wholly into JFNA.
Instead, after a process that included officials from both groups as well as from local Jewish community relations councils, which are mostly controlled by their local Jewish federations, the decision was to tease apart the organizations. The decision means that JCPA will no longer officially speak on behalf of the community relations councils, and also will not draw dues from them or from the 16 national organizations that have funded it up to now.
But while the group will take on a fundraising challenge, those who engineered the new structure say it will also be insulated from the difficulties of arriving at a consensus in an increasingly polarized political environment.
Rabbi Doug Kahn, the retired longtime director of the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council who was a consultant in the restructuring, said the new arrangement is meant to offer a positive answer to the question, “Can we move forward in a way that enables us to be more impactful on our core issues, and more nimble at the same time, while retaining close relationships with our key stakeholders going forward?”
Rori Pickler Neiss, who heads the St. Louis JCRC, was among a number of local community relations council directors who had lost hope that the JCPA could adequately represent them. Now she said, she was hopeful it could resume its role of convening a national Jewish consensus around critical issues.
“The model of consensus-building in the way that some of the mainstream organizations talk about it has really been consensus towards a very narrow group of voices that wants to claim representation of the entire Jewish community,” she said. The newly constituted JCPA “is opening itself up to what could be greater consensus in a sense of a much broader community than many of our models have allowed for.”
The brochure tied to the split indicates some of the issues on which the renewed JCPA will advocate. “JCPA will represent a strong independent voice within the American Jewish community on issues aimed at strengthening our democracy and commitment to an inclusive and just society out of the belief that such conditions are essential in a pluralistic society and for the well-being of the Jewish people and Israel,” it said. “The reset takes place against a backdrop of rising antisemitism, racism, bigotry and hate, and polarization, and continued threats to our democracy.”
The group is launching two new initiatives, both apparently likely to dismay conservatives. One would focus on “voting rights, election integrity, disinformation, extremism as a threat to democracy, and civics education.” The other would focus on “racial justice, criminal justice reform and gun violence, LGBTQ rights, immigration rights, reproductive rights, and fighting hate violence.”
Some of the 16 groups that have paid dues to the JCPA in the past are supporting the restructured group. The new JCPA will rely at first on a three-year commitment from the UJA Federation of New York, one of the biggest pillars of the JFNA.
It’s not clear yet how the more conservative among the 16 groups will react. Nathan Diament, the Washington director for the Orthodox Union, said his group would wait and see how the new JCPA develops. But he said he regretted the polarization that led to the change.
“The trajectory of that JCPA is a reflection of the of the broader trend, more than anything about the JCPA itself,” Diament said. “It’s harder to find consensus these days with regards to Israel, it’s harder to find consensus with regard to a large list of domestic policy matters. I mean, even while we were in the JCPA we were in the position of having to dissent on some prominent issues.”
David Bohm, the current JCPA chairman who led the restructuring talks, said the organization would remain nonpartisan — but acknowledged that it’s become harder to maintain the perception.
“In today’s polarized environment, people get accused of being partisan when they take a stand on any issue, so I don’t know if that can be totally avoided,” he said in an interview.
The JFNA in a statement welcomed the new configuration. “We look forward to continuing to work collaboratively with JCPA — as we always have — as it tackles issues of importance to Jewish communities in its new format.”
In an interview, Elana Broitman, JFNA’s senior vice president for public affairs, said the new configuration would allow the JCPA to delve deeper on its favored issues. “If the JCPA is focused on particular issues, they can perhaps go into more depth on those issues that they had the opportunity to before,” she said.
In the past, the JCPA has taken positions on issues like voting rights, gun control, immigration rights and abortion, because they were favored by the local JCRCs with which it consulted and which sent delegates to its annual conference. Those JCRCs often initiated liberal policies, in part because they were favored by an American Jewish grassroots that polls show trends overwhelmingly liberal.
Another factor was the give and take in local community relations: Jewish groups seeking support for Jewish issues from Black, Latino, Asian American and other minority groups were happy to reciprocate on those groups’ favored issues.
But the JCPA’s profile on those issues has diminished in recent years; the smaller donor base triggered by the 2008 recession forced the vast majority of JCRCs to fold into their local federations, and to reflect the priorities of the federation donor base as opposed to the congregations, Jewish labor groups and fraternal organizations that once drove the agenda for Jewish community relations.
Tensions between the JCPA and the JFNA intensified in the summer of 2020, after a Minneapolis policeman murdered George Floyd, triggering civil rights protests and the “Black Lives Matter” ad by Jewish groups that JCPA signed onto.
The JFNA CEO, Eric Fingerhut, insiders said then, was not happy about having to explain to donors why JCPA was embracing a group identified closely with a movement perceived by some conservatives as radical and anti-Israel.
The new JCPA is betting that there are donors ready to support a progressive domestic Jewish lobby. In addition to the three-year grant from UJA-Federation, two other grants will come from a past chairwoman of the JCPA, Lois Frank, and its current chairman, Bohm.
Bohm, an attorney who assumed leadership of the JCPA in 2021, said the group would take a hit by losing the JFNA’s allocations and the dues it collects from the 125 community relations councils — but he expected to make it up with money from foundations invested in the the JCPA’s new agenda, including from individual federations.
“We expect we may lose some funding,” he said. “We’re hoping it’s not significant.”
“We are beginning to hear from foundations that have not historically necessarily focused on community relations, but now recognize why that is such an important part in the toolkit,” Kahn added.
Bohm said the board would be independent and limited to 30 people. “We will continue to have board members who are either JCRC directors or current or past chairs of JCRCs, but they will not be representing their specific community,” he said in an email after the interview. “Instead they will represent the Jewish community relations field as a whole.”
JCPA’s annual budget is now less than $2 million, Kahn said, down from nearly $4 million in 2015, and its staff has dropped from 13 in the 2000s to four. The group is seeking a fifth staffer now and hope eventually to employ at least 13.
Beyond polarization, a number of factors have been at play in diminishing the role of consensus-based Jewish community relations. There has been a flourishing of single-issue nonprofit groups, many of them Jewish, that are more attractive to donors than general interest groups.
Kahn noted that in the mid-1990s when many of the agenda items the national Jewish community pursued for decades seemed to be resolving themselves: Peace was breaking out between Israel and its neighbors, the Soviet Union collapsed and freed its Jews to travel, immigration reform was on track and race relations appeared to be improving.
“There was this shift from focusing on the external challenges or threats to more of the internal threats within the Jewish community,” he said, referring to an emphasis on Jewish education to counter assimilation.
The fragility of the hopes for peace and democratic growth in the 1990s were made evident in subsequent years with the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the eruption of the Second Intifada and the rise of nativist sentiment and its attendant bigotries, culminating in the Trump presidency.
Kahn said his hope was that the JCPA would once again assume the role it played from 1944, when it was founded as the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council: raising Holocaust awareness and taking the lead in promoting immigration in the late 1940s, establishing the Black-Jewish alliance in the 1950s, defending Israel in the 1960s, and advocating for Soviet Jewry until the USSR’s collapse.
He saw hope in the turnout of non-Jewish support for Jews after the recent deadly attacks on Jewish institutions, including the gunman who massacred 11 worshipers in Pittsburgh in 2018. “I think this model will enable that kind of solidarity-building around issues of common cause to grow infinitely greater than it’s been able to, up until now,” he said.
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Putin and Trump Do Not Support European-Ukrainian Temporary Ceasefire Idea, the Kremlin Says
Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers a speech during a session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. Photo: Reuters/Maxim Shemetov
The Kremlin said on Sunday that Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump do not support a European-Ukrainian push for a temporary ceasefire ahead of a settlement, and that Moscow thinks Kyiv needs to make a decision on Donbas.
Kremlin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov said that a call between Putin and Trump lasted 1 hour and 15 minutes and took place at the request of Trump ahead of Trump’s meeting in Miami with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
“The main thing is that the presidents of Russia and the United States hold similar views that the option of a temporary ceasefire proposed by the Ukrainians and the Europeans under the pretext of preparing for a referendum or under other pretexts only leads to a prolongation of the conflict and is fraught with renewed hostilities,” Ushakov said.
Ushakov said that for hostilities to end, Kyiv needed to make a “bold decision” in line with Russian-US discussions on Donbas.
“Given the current situation on the fronts, it would make sense for the Ukrainian regime to make this decision regarding Donbas.”
Russia, which controls 90 percent of Donbas, wants Ukraine to withdraw its forces from the 10 percent of the area that Kyiv’s forces still control. Overall, Russia controls about a fifth of Ukraine.
Trump has repeatedly promised to end the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War Two and his envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner have been negotiating with Russia, Ukraine and European powers.
Ukraine and its European allies are worried that Trump could sell out Ukraine and leave European powers to foot the bill for supporting a devastated Ukraine after Russian forces took 12-17 square km (4.6-6.6 square miles) of Ukraine per day in 2025.
“Donald Trump listened attentively to Russian assessments of the real prospects for reaching an agreement,” Ushakov said.
“Trump persistently pursued the idea that it was really necessary to end the war as soon as possible, and spoke about the impressive prospects for economic cooperation between the United States and Russia and Ukraine that were opening up,” Ushakov said.
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Zelensky to Meet Trump in Florida for Talks on Ukraine Peace Plan
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump welcomes Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 17, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and US President Donald Trump will meet in Florida on Sunday to forge a plan to end the war in Ukraine, but face differences over major issues, including territory, as Russian air raids pile pressure on Kyiv.
Russia hit the capital and other parts of Ukraine with hundreds of missiles and drones on Saturday, knocking out power and heat in parts of the capital. On Saturday, during a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in Nova Scotia, Zelensky called it Russia’s response to the US-brokered peace efforts.
Zelensky has told journalists that he plans to discuss the fate of eastern Ukraine’s contested Donbas region during the meeting at Trump’s Florida residence, as well as the future of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and other topics.
The Ukrainian president and his delegation arrived in Florida late on Saturday, Ukraine’s Deputy Foreign Minister Serhiy Kyslytsya said on X.
RUSSIA CLAIMS MORE BATTLEFIELD ADVANCES
Moscow has repeatedly insisted that Ukraine yield all of the Donbas, even areas still under Kyiv’s control, and Russian officials have objected to other parts of the latest proposal, sparking doubts about whether Russian President Vladimir Putin would accept whatever Sunday’s talks might produce.
Putin said on Saturday Moscow would continue waging its war if Kyiv did not seek a quick peace. Russia has steadily advanced on the battlefield in recent months, claiming control over several more settlements on Sunday.
The Ukrainian president told Axios on Friday he hopes to soften a US proposal for Ukrainian forces to withdraw completely from the Donbas. Failing that, Zelensky said the entire 20-point plan, the result of weeks of negotiations, should be put to a referendum.
A recent poll suggests that Ukrainian voters may reject the plan.
Zelensky’s in-person meeting with Trump, scheduled for 1 p.m. (1800 GMT), follows weeks of diplomatic efforts. European allies, while at times cut out of the loop, have stepped up efforts to sketch out the contours of a post-war security guarantee for Kyiv that the United States would support.
On Sunday, ahead of his meeting with Trump, Zelensky said he held a detailed phone call with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Trump and Zelensky were also expected to hold a phone call with European leaders during their Florida meeting, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian president said on Sunday.
STICKING POINTS OVER TERRITORY
Kyiv and Washington have agreed on many issues, and Zelensky said on Friday that the 20-point plan was 90% finished. But the issue of what territory, if any, will be ceded to Russia remains unresolved.
While Moscow insists on getting all of the Donbas, Kyiv wants the map frozen at current battle lines.
The United States, seeking a compromise, has proposed a free economic zone if Ukraine leaves the area, although it remains unclear how that zone would function in practical terms.
It has also proposed shared control over the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, where power line repairs have begun after another local ceasefire brokered by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the agency said on Sunday.
Zelensky, whose past meetings with Trump have not always gone smoothly, worries along with his European allies that Trump could sell out Ukraine and leave European powers to foot the bill for supporting a devastated nation, after Russian forces took 12 to 17 square km (4.6-6.6 square miles) of its territory per day in 2025.
Russia controls all of Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, and since its invasion of Ukraine nearly four years ago has taken control of about 12 percent of its territory, including about 90 percent of Donbas, 75 percent of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, and slivers of the Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions, according to Russian estimates.
Putin said on December 19 that a peace deal should be based on conditions he set out in 2024: Ukraine withdrawing from all of the Donbas, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, and Kyiv officially renouncing its aim to join NATO.
Ukrainian officials and European leaders view the war as an imperial-style land grab by Moscow and have warned that if Russia gets its way with Ukraine, it will one day attack NATO members.
The 20-point plan was spun off from a Russian-led 28-point plan, which emerged from talks between U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Russian special envoy Kirill Dmitriev, and which became public in November.
Subsequent talks between Ukrainian officials and U.S. negotiators have produced the more Kyiv-friendly 20-point plan.
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Central African Republic Votes, Russia Ally Touadera Seeks Third Term
People wait to cast their vote at a polling station during the presidential election in Bangui, Central African Republic, December 28, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/ Leger Serge Kokpakpa
Central African Republic President Faustin-Archange Touadera is seeking a third term on Sunday as the chronically unstable country holds national elections, touting security gains made with the help of Russian mercenaries and Rwandan soldiers.
The 68-year-old mathematician oversaw a constitutional referendum in 2023 that scrapped the presidential term limit, drawing an outcry from his critics who accused him of seeking to rule for life.
A Touadera victory – the expected outcome – would likely further the interests of Russia, which has traded security assistance for access to resources including gold and diamonds. Touadera is also offering access to the country’s lithium and uranium reserves to anyone interested.
Polling stations opened on time at 6 a.m. (0500 GMT) in the capital, Bangui, a Reuters witness said. They were due to close at 6 p.m. (1700 GMT), with provisional results expected by January 5. Nearly 2.4 million people were registered to vote.
Casting her ballot in Bangui, shopkeeper Beatrice Mokonzapa said women had “suffered greatly” during Central African Republic’s years of conflict but that the situation had improved.
“We have security today. I hope it continues. And for that, President Touadera is best placed to guarantee our security,” she said.
SIX OPPONENTS CHALLENGE TOUADERA
The opposition field of six candidates is led by two former prime ministers, Anicet-Georges Dologuele and Henri-Marie Dondra, both of whom survived attempts by Touadera’s supporters to have them disqualified for allegedly holding foreign citizenship.
Though both men remain on the ballot, Touadera is still seen as the favorite given his control over state institutions and superior financial resources, analysts say.
In an interview with Reuters on Wednesday, Dondra said the playing field was “unbalanced” and that he had been unable to travel as widely as Touadera to campaign. He nevertheless predicted he would have a strong showing.
The challenges to the candidacies of Dologuele and Dondra “aligned with an apparent pattern of administrative manoeuvring that has disproportionately impeded opposition politicians while favouring the ruling United Hearts Party,” Human Rights Watch said last month.
Voting in the capital early on Sunday, teacher Albert Komifea said he wanted a change, without specifying who he had backed.
“They did everything they could to prevent the opposition from campaigning effectively, in order to reduce their chances,” he said. “But the ballot box will confirm that change is now.”
RUSSIA AND RWANDA REINFORCE TOUADERA
In 2018, CAR became the first country in West and Central Africa to bring in Russia’s Wagner mercenaries, a step since also taken by Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.
Two years later, Rwanda deployed troops to shore up Touadera’s government as rebel groups threatened the capital and tried to disrupt the 2020 elections, ultimately preventing voting at 800 polling stations across the country, or 14% of the total.
The country is more secure now after Touadera signed several peace deals with rebel groups this year.
But those gains remain fragile: Rebels have not fully disarmed, reintegration is incomplete, and incursions by combatants from neighboring Sudan fuel insecurity in the east.
Beyond the presidential contest, the elections on Sunday cover legislative, regional and municipal positions.
If no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, a presidential runoff will take place on February 15, while legislative runoffs will take place on April 5.
Pangea-Risk, a consultancy, wrote in a note to clients that the risk of unrest after the election was high as opponents were likely to challenge Touadera’s expected victory.
A smooth voting process could reinforce Touadera’s claim that stability is returning, which was buttressed last year with the U.N. Security Council’s lifting of an arms embargo and the lifting of a separate embargo on diamond exports.
In November, the U.N. Security Council extended the mandate of its peacekeeping mission. The US opposed the decision, calling for a shorter extension and a handover of security to Bangui.